Monday, 10 June 2013

On censorship, surveillance and dystopia

Cynics often take stances that are dark, pessimistic and leave little room for
what sociologically could be called an ‘agency’-based approach. Censorship is
one such area. Invocations of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave
New World,conspiracy theories, surveillance societies, are
inevitable and unavoidable. Reality, however, to disappoint many, is far more
complex and nuanced than ‘governments-out-to-get-us’. But then again,
governments are getting us—artists, journalists, or activists, who
express dissenting opinions, or upset the status-quo; people who question
governments and regimes—both, dictatorships and democracies. The media and
culture industries are stronger and more insidious than ever: not only are they
manufacturing consent, they also manufacture conscience, often from a moral
high-ground. Conversely, there’s also a new wave of media that destabilises
these assumptions, with credible and commendable critiques. The picture, to put
it in simpler words, is horribly complicated. And because we’re very used to a debate configured in binaries, his often disappoints cynics and
their critics.

Last Thursday night, I
had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion on 'Censorship and Society', organised by Asia Society India
and OPEN magazine. The panel, moderated by Supreme Court advocate,
Madhavi Goradia Divan, consisted of brilliant speakers, like Mahesh Murthy,
Neville Taraporewalla and Anjum Rajabali. Thus, their expertise ranged from
media laws, new and social media, scriptwriting, and cinema. The arguments,
therefore, covered a diverse range of topics, many of them discussing the
nuances of the right to free speech, freedom of expression, and the right to
information, and, of course, the media.

However, this post
is not a report of last night’s debate; although, many of the arguments from it
shall be the foci of my analyses of censorship, it shall not be limited to the
same. In the following segments, I will review some of the pertinent points
from last night, and proffer analyses of points which the panel missed out, or
did not engage with adequately.

Anjum Rajabali, who
wrote the scripts for movies like Aarakshan, Rajneeti,
and the critically acclaimed The Legend of Bhagat Singh, suggested
that we be more passionate about our liberties and expression. He cited the
cases where films in India have been banned, or censored often under the threat
of violence made by fringe groups. In many cases, like Kamal Hasan’s Vishwaroopam,
films are banned even when passed by the CBFC. He said that the film community
is a fairly strong and powerful group; but producers, instead of challenging
these calls for bans and censorships, immediately buckle. The government
defending the peoples’ liberties, he said, is a pipe dream.

Censorship, then, covers a myriad range of issues
and concerns, and it’s nearly impossible to give justice to—or even list
out—all of them. From the panel’s discussion, however, it seemed clear that
Murthy and, to a lesser extent, Taraporewalla, were of the notion that we don’t
need censorship. Murthy’s arguments included the idea that more repression
would lead to the Streisand Effect. We,
according to Murthy—and this included politicians, public, fringe groups,
etc.—need to “develop thicker skins”; that we “need to protect ourselves from
offense”, and not expect the state to do so. Murthy, in my opinion, explained
instances of censorship as aberrations: how imbalanced and immature society, and the political class is, to react to criticisms (to his credit, he also said that no
society is ever mature). However, this is problematic on two accounts.

Firstly, the media is
deeply political; access to media, and the access to representation itself is
imbalanced, warped and contingent (this was made clear by Rajabali’s response
to Murthy). So, to suggest that Muslims should not take offense at drawings of
the Prophet ignores the complex geopolitical configurations in which debates on
Islam are embedded and embroiled in. It is, also, a hegemonic system: Muslims
may not have equal access to representation without reductionist debates
defining what Islam is and how violent it is (see, as an example, the Intelligence Squared debate ‘Islam
is a Religion of Peace’, especially Maajid Nawaz’s interventions).
One need only look at ground breaking studies on media and culture industries,
like Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Culture Industryor
Noam Chomsky’s Media Control, Necessary Illusionsand Manufacturing Consent (co-authored by
Edward Herman), for an understanding of how imbalanced, misplaced
and biased media representation can be.

Secondly, with the
advent of the new media, conventional media has come under intense scrutiny. As
Murthy pointed out, the new media (which, he claims is us) has outmoded the
conventional media; far more Indians now rely on the web for information
dissemination, and access to it; express their opinions on it, and so forth.
Thus, any critique of media in the 21st century has to
be a discursive critique, not an objective one. With the sheer complexity
of the media, this task has become difficult, if not entirely impossible. And
formulating a critique of this shall be my concern in the proceeding
paragraphs.

A plea for more
censorship in these cases is very problematic, and often unfeasible. For one,
what would constitute censorship here: the fact that members of the public are
trying to censure women? Or that we, the more liberal, secular voices, want
more regulation? Both these questions only deal with the symptoms: the latter
is difficult because most abusers use anonymous profiles or handles, which are
notoriously difficult to track. Moreover, the fact that the police and law
enforcement agencies simply do not care exacerbates things. Tragically, this
leads to public intellectuals and journalists, like Ghose and Krishnan, to
self-censor. It is unacceptable that any self-respecting activist or writer,
irrespective of their gender and political leanings, ignore such slander and
threats, or “have thick skins”, as Murthy suggested.

The deeper problem
here is that there is no discipline in using the new media and the internet.
While we may celebrate anonymity and anarchy on the web, every time a group
like Anonymous or Op India hacks a government webpage (merely a cosmetic
exercise in my view), there is no deeper or meaningful engagement with the
politics of the internet. Most comments on websites like CNN IBN, or NDTV, or Hindustan
Times are trolls, often lampooning the “sickular” nature of writers
and journalists. If, as Murthy put it, the internet is a mirror to society, then
we are, largely, a very awful society, no?

III

The semantics of censorship, then, can configure
our debates and discussion in limited ways. Not that this was a major flaw in
the panel; it would be ridiculous to assume that. But it is also equally important that
we pay attention to the theme of surveillance. Hugely popular in sociological
and cultural studies literature, the theme of surveillance and policing gained
prominence with the influential works of Michel Foucault, mainly his book, Discipline and Punish.
The radical notion proposed by Foucault was using Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ as a metaphor
for the policing everyone engages in. Thus, peoples’ sexualities, their health,
opinions, and other facets come to be policed by soft institutions, like the
market, the health and medical industries. It is important to note that
Foucault was wary of configuring panopticism and surveillance in rigid
binaries; power, for him, is fluid, and exists in micro spaces and
“capillaries”, and wherever there is power, there is also resistance to it.
Thus, he recommends that we “cut off the head of the king”; that is, look at
power configurations as more fluid and complex, rather than emanating from one
particular source, like the government or oligarchies.

Following Foucault,
surveillance, then, has a lot of ramifications for debates on censorship: one,
there is both abject apathy and brutal repression on the part of the state in
defining what dissent or offense is, which influences its response: thus, the
women at Palghar were arrested promptly, but women who file complaints receive
no action altogether. To put it in simple words: ‘society’ should be as much
the subject of interrogation, as ‘censorship’ is.

In an earlier post, I had argued that the
arrests of Aseem Trivedi and the Jadhavpur University professor, and the
government’s crackdown on the protesters in India Gate after the brutal
gang-rape and murder incident, are the result of (what I called) a ‘governance
of paranoia’. That is, politicians’ and the political class’ fear of dissent is
fuelled by the fact that political leadership in the country has become
fragile, tenuous, and must reassert, to use philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s terms, “that the emperor
is clothed”. In simpler words, the information society we are living
in is more opaque than transparent; information is more readily accessible than
its credentials. This makes slander a great political tool. Unfortunately, the
real victims of slander—Ghose, Krishnan and the millions of other women—are
conspicuously left out.

The debate, thus,
must focus on not if we need more or less censorship and regulation, but
critically examine the dynamics of the same. That is, we must
constantly be wary of censorship/surveillance of freedom of expression, and of
censorship/surveillance of our access to information. It is in the latter that
we are often failing.

Education and
pedagogy are areas where censorship is most operational. One reason for this,
perhaps, is because the link between pedagogy and propaganda is most direct: we
saw this in Nazi Germany. China is experimenting on this presently; even in
India, the teaching (and writing) of history often reasserts moral values
rather than a critical interrogation of the same. But who is it that decides
what students should study and what they should not? More importantly, on what
grounds are these decisions made? This question: of censorship in education,
was the one I posed to the panel. Unfortunately, their response was less than
adequate.

Nevertheless,
Neville Taraporewalla’s reply, where he said we need to agitate more, and,
curiously, that we have failed the Anna Hazare movement, was completely beside
the point. (In my opinion, the Anna Hazare movement failed itself; as did Anjum
Rajabali, if I remember correctly. Do read this post I wrote during
the peak of the movement). Madhavi Divan’s response was more articulate, when
she said that we need to speak up against such street censorship. However,
Mamata Banerjee’s ban on Marx and the newspapers was not street censorship; it was one initiated
by the political executive. So was the detoxifying of syllabi by Arjun Singh in 2004.
And, if you bear with me, so is the Delhi University’s ambitious plan of the
four year undergraduate programme (FYUP)—and I say so because not only does
this overburden students with less-than-required courses, but because the poor
quality of the same would fail to instill any sense of criticality in
them (see Gautham Bhan's excellent review of
the FYUP on Kafila).

IV

As with most discussions I’ve had the fortune of
attending, this one, too was enlightening. Certainly, there were several
perspectives I came across, many of which I wasn’t aware of, or never
considered. At the same time, I was also fortunate enough to find an engaging
forum to express and apply ideas I already had.

On a more personal
note, censorship is something about which I have very strong sentiments: not
because, as someone aspiring to be in the expressing-ideas vocation, I wish to
ensure that the creeping political influence is kept in check. But, because by denying access to newer ideas, and spaces for debate and discussion, I believe that
we’re inching closer to a kind of dystopia—or, as Francis Fukuyama would have it, a tale of “two dystopia”—where our
opinions and ideas would either lead to persecution, or self-censorship, both
of which are unacceptable to me. For, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not only the
censorship of opinion/expression that we must be worried about, but also that
of our access to informed, free, and credible opinions and ideas.

Notes & Acknowledgements: For the comments made by the panelists, I have, to
the best of my abilities, provided quotes, and summaries of the general gist of
the discussions. And I take full responsibility of any misquotes, and am more
than willing to change them, if credible corrections are pointed out. My
arguments, of course, are my own, and I believe I have done enough to specify
the same.

There are several ideas, some covered by the panel and some not, that I
have missed out entirely; for instance, Wikileaks, the on-going trial of
Bradley Manning, or the United States government’s incessant surveillance of
journalists, and even the debate on copy-right infringement and intellectual
property rights (like the Delhi University photocopying case). These examples clearly can, and need to, be addressed by any
discussion on censorship.

I am thankful to Nolina Minj, Malathi Jogi, Natasha Patel and Alex Thomas for their reviews of this essay. Unfortunately, due to certain logistical constraints, I haven't been able to make the all changes they recommended. I shall do my best to do so in the next blog update.

4 comments:

Brilliant post! The only point I differ on is that I won't characterize the changes that are coming in the newer forms of media in qualitatively different terms. Internet has caused a burst of literacy and increase in access, no doubt. But early newspapers and urbanization did the same in their time. Do we find correlates between now and then? For some phenomena, yes. Slandering, definitely not new. Threatening, not new either. Yes, there's a world of difference between moderation in newspapers (which letters to the editor get selected) and moderation on social media. Anyhow, to me the slander of the foulmouthed is also a product and sub-process of the manufacture of consent. So the important thing to take care still remains the same.

Of course, the problems of old media are - although compounded - relevant for new media as well. Which is where I tend to disagree to a holier-than-thou attitude towards new media, and all its emancipating claims. Yes, it's problematic to construe the manufacture of consent (or conscience) as a top-down process; which is why I find a Foucauldian concept of power being dispersed useful. But I'm also wary of being limited by it. And perhaps, that's the challenge for us: to hold seemingly diametrical ideas in our heads, and engage in sustained critiques.

Btw, I did mean manfacture of consent/conscience as a top-down process. If it's in the context of a media, then it's difficult to imagine that consumers exert any direct force upon the media-owners of a kind that the media-owners could exert.

Excellent write-up Proshant! I am glad to be exposed to so many of these new ideas of looking at surveillance.

Something that particularly interests me, is this idea of 'soft institutions' that socialize populations into a certain worldview and belief that is further played out by the latter to monitor and repress dissenting voices. I see that it is the undercurrent factor in many of the examples that you have cited.

I strongly agree with you about the idea of a lopsided access to ideas, information and representation. It is such a seering factor today that, for instance, dictates most of our citizen discourse about political leaders and the debates that go around them.

On a similar vein, I would also like to share with you a personal instance about the persecution- self-censorship dichotomy. If you remember, we were discussing about ideas of justice, punishment and things like that on a recent Facebook update I had put up about the rape incident. A couple of days later, my Mom was quite aghast by reading the update and she strongly demanded me to stop expressing my opinions for fear of an external backlash. I asked her a simple question, "If you disagree with me, should I stop expressing my ideas and opinions?" I was not expecting this, but she responded in positive. That's what soft institutions do to you.